On 30 May 2014, at 0:14, Gary Hull wrote:
I think I may have read an old thread there where Benny may have expressed his opposition to this idea because it flouted RFC gospel, but Mail.app used to have a Bounce to Sender option where you could send a sort of counterfeit bounced e-mail to trolls or people from your past who you're not thrill have tracked you down.
Note that "flouted RFC gospel" should be understood to mean "amounted to material fraud."
Speaking from the viewpoint of a mail admin and erstwhile abuse desk wrangler: that misfeature in Mail.app and a few Unix MUAs was a harmful nuisance whose extermination has been an unalloyed good.
This was a lot of fun, I have to admit, and I missed it when I switched to Gmail. If you examined the headers closely, I think you could figure out that it wasn't a real bounced e-mail, but that was beyond the ability of most people.
I'll refrain from sharing my estimation of the median email comprehension of email users, but it is in fact quite simple to tell that the best possible fake bounce is fake, unless the fake is generated and submitted on the original target's final delivery mail server which has software and configurations that have been obsolete since the mid-90s. That's why the fake bounce seemed feasible for some classical Unix MUAs from that era. In the modern email world the fake bounce may not be detected as fake by an intended recipient, not because that is hard to do but because robotic spam control mechanisms notice the fraud in transit, either as a real asynchronous bounce (widely recognized as problematic "blowback" from forged spam) or as the fraud it is. Either way, the fake bounce itself can damage the public reputation of the server handling it, making it more likely that legitimate mail from the same system will be shunned and *properly* making it reasonable for the mail provider to cut off the user engaging in the fraud. This becomes a bigger problem in light of the fact that some users who are offered the "bounce" misfeature will be entirely ignorant of its limitations and risks, and will use it in unjustifiable circumstances and/or high volume.
In short: fake bounce functionality is a trap that is more likely to cause users to *JUSTIFIABLY* lose their email accounts than it is to result in the outcomes they seek.
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